From January 5 to 8, the “Cēsis” concert hall hosts the “Enveloping winter” space music event, which will take place in a specially built sound dome, offering a new musical experience in different projections. Enjoying specially created ambisonic compositions, the listener will be taken to a unique spatial dimension and will be able to feel what winter sounds like.
At the center of the Aula Magna of the “Cēsis” concert hall there will be a dome, or room within a room, equipped with a surround sound system for concerts and numerous loudspeakers, and seats for the audience will be located inside it.
For the first time, the dome of the “Cēsis” concert hall was built and opened to the public in January 2022, introducing the audience to space music as a special genre, and including contemporary sound models specially created for the event in the program. This year the event has become more international: composers from the Nordic and Baltic countries will take part.
“The sound installation in the room can be created in different ways, and in cooperation with the representatives of the Cēsis concert hall, we decided that the concert on the dome will focus on the winter theme, or on the northern theme,” says the curator of the project – Lithuanian composer, sound artist, associate professor of the Composition Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, Mantauts Krukauskas. He also reveals that the program is ambient music soundtracks – it will be minimalistic aesthetics of the Baltic and Nordic countries, and the purpose of this musical story is to create a wintery atmosphere for the listeners.”
The choice of composers this year is linked to the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Latvia will be represented by Platons Buravickis and Krista Dinter, Lithuania by Mantauts Krukauskas himself and Gedmintė Samsonaitė, who currently lives and works in Great Britain and mainly writes film music, Norway by Tine Surel Lange, Estonia by Theodore Parker, who lives in the USA. All the soundtracks put into music the sensations we experience and the nature we look at in winter.
Mantauts Krukauskas also points out that one of the composers who will “participate” in this concert will be Antonio Vivaldi, because in this program one of Vivaldi’s best-known works – “Ziema” from the “Seasons” concert cycle – will be transformed into postmodern winter moods. It was created with special sounds by Krukauskas himself together with his colleague, and this recording will not be played by a real baroque orchestra, but by a modern synthesizer. The recording will also have a voice, and it will be the Latvian singer Monta Martinsone, who is an excellent baroque interpreter. “So – it will be a real reproduction of Baroque temperament and tuning, but not with Baroque instruments, but with modern synthesizers, and it could be extremely interesting.”
Last year, when the Ambisonic Music Concert in the Dome was performed for the first time in the “Cēsis” Concert Hall, it was illuminated with a bluish light. Does light and its color play an essential role in an ambisonic music concert? “Decidedly!” argues Krukauskas. “Because every day we hear sounds, and we perceive them in connection with what we see. That’s why, in a concert, the light and its color will help our brain create images that are closer to the winter atmosphere. The light will be the one that will help set the winter mood along with the music.”
Together with Platon Buravicki, Latvia will be represented in this project by Krista Dinter. “First of all I am a sound artist, secondly a teacher: At the Latvian Academy of Music, I teach everything related to sound art and the application of sound technology in more unconventional ways: both how to create ambient sounds and sound design, as well as thinking about how sound affects a person and how we perceive sound in general. I’m still very active in Liepāja University, where I work in the art research laboratory – we have the “New media art” program , of which I myself am a master’s graduate. But the cooperation with the music academy is quite old, because the composer Rolands Kronlaks and the sound artist Voldemar Johansson are my professors,” introduces Krista Dinter.
Last year he was in the audience at the dome concert in Cēsis. “I was very happy with the result and the fact that these technologies and the way of expressing sound in general have also come down to us. Already in 2019 in Liepaja in cooperation with “Dirty Deal Audio” there was already a great concert of ambisonic music, and that, in my opinion, was the first such large-scale project of this kind – the “Baltic Trayl” electronic music talent camp, the finale of which was a concert made in collaboration with Mantautas Krukauskas and music composers electroacoustics has formed in the last few years in an ever closer cooperation and is becoming more and more interesting and more intense”, thinks Dinter.
What exactly is the extraordinary thing that the public has the opportunity to experience while sitting surrounded by this dome? What creates the extraordinary feeling that Cesis is worth going to? “In my opinion, this kind of spatial reproduction somehow appeals more to our auditory senses, because we also perceive the world around us spatially in everyday life – we perceive sound from all directions. Maybe we don’t even think about it every day, but in fact, how we feel in a particular room depends in many ways on the acoustics of the specific room and what acoustic markers we perceive. Therefore, if composers or sound artists are given the opportunity to work with the sound in a room, it’s wonderful!”
Does such an acoustic experience also affect the physical side of a person? Krista Dinter is inclined to think so. “In recent years, immersion in various media has become very popular – both in virtual reality and – as in this case – in the immersive sound that surrounds you. In my opinion, listening to this type of music is another level where you can afford yourself to form around your space.”
Krista Dinter’s composition entitled “When all the clues are missing” will be played in the project “Eskaujušća ziema”. “In a way, it’s related to winter and this time when everything around is quiet and we have enough time to reflect,” says the composer. “The work was created in 2020, but its ambisonic version will be played for the first time in Cēsis. We can adapt the pieces – just like Vivaldi’s ‘Seasons’. In this case, my piece is about how, listening music, listening to sounds, a person can get rid of worries, worries and tensions. This work originally came out of the “Art for a Longer Life” project, where we invited people to think about how to improve their lives through the use of piece is made up of registered clicks, rattles and thumps created by… of the knitting process. In the knitting process, you see the result very quickly, and it’s also scientifically proven – that knitting and other handicrafts help to calm down, even have a beneficial effect on blood pressure.In this case, it is a meditation on the topic of knitting, which begins with completely natural sounds – from ticks, rattles and crackles, superintend I give to a meditative sound composition in which knitting needles are used to play stringed instruments”.
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